Cynthia Nelson was an outstanding professor of anthropology at AUC and the founding director of the Institute of Gender and Women’s Studies. This collection of her essays, which highlight her distinguished scholarly career, is grouped under three main themes: phenomenology and the meaning of religious phenomena in Egypt; women, power, and politics in the Middle East; and the politics and ethics of location. Cynthia Nelson was the editor of the first Cairo Papers monograph in 1977: thirty years later, this issue marks her legacy to the humanistic and social scientific understanding of Egypt, a legacy balanced by the enormous institutional contributions she made to establishing feminist anthropology in Egypt. Cairo Papers Vol. 28, No. 2
Pioneering Feminist Anthropology in Egypt: Selected Writings from Cynthia Nelson
Cairo Papers Vol. 28, No. 2/3
Edited byMartina Rieker
Contributions by
Lila Abu-Lughod
Judith E. Tucker
216 pp.
14X21.5cm
ISBN 9789774160783
For sale worldwide
19.95
Lila Abu-Lughod
Related products
Bedouin, Settlers, and Holiday-Makers
Egypt’s Changing Northwest Coast
Donald P. ColeSoraya Altorki
The arid regions impose strict limits upon human existence and activity. And yet by respecting those limits, the flourishing and stable culture of these regions has for centuries been sustained. In the late twentieth century, however, forces such as modernization, globalization, and the politics and economics of nations became so great that major changes in the old ways had to take place for the sake of survival. Egypt’s northwest coast, where meager coastal rains have supported a sparse but thriving population of Bedouin, saw the arrival of settlers from the Nile Valley, accustomed to a very different way of life and production, and hordes of tourists whose “empty, silent structures” effectively turned the most productive strip of the coastal range into an artificial desert. This study documents the great accommodations that took place to ensure the arid rangelands of the northwest coast continue to be viable for the demands of human existence imposed on them. “A main thesis of this study,” the authors write, “is that change in the northwest coast of Egypt has strong parallels in other arid regions of the wider Arab world; and specific comparisons are made to change underway elsewhere—especially regarding the transformation of Arab nomadic pastoralist production to a new form of ranching, and the related changes of sedentarization and the monetization of most aspects of livelihood.”
...read more
e-book
266 pp.2 maps
14.5X23cm
9.99
This book is only available for purchase from Egypt
Cairo Contested
Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity
Edited by Diane SingermanThis cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical volume—with an updated introduction to take account of the dramatic events of early 2011—explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public’s role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the “march to the modern and the global” as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies.
...read more
Paperback
536 pp.15X23cm
19.95
Anthropology in Egypt, 1900–67: Culture, Function, and Reform
Cairo Papers Vol. 33, No. 2
Nicholas S. HopkinsAnthropology as a discipline came to Egypt around 1900, as foreign anthropologists reported home on the culture they found. Gradually the intellectual approach was influenced by the functionalist school, stressing that a society consists of interlocking parts. As Egyptians took the lead in anthropology, in the 1930s, the discipline entered into the debate about the need to reform Egyptian society and culture especially in the rural areas, against a general background of functionalism. This approach dominated through the 1960s, when there was a break in Egypt because of the Six-Day War and in world anthropology because of the emergence of new intellectual models. This study traces the evolution of anthropology in Egypt through the stories of its practitioners such as Blackman, Galal, Evans-Pritchard, Hocart, Abbas Ammar, Hamid Ammar, Berque, Abou Zeid, el Hamamsy, Uways, and their contemporaries, showing their challenges and accomplishments.
...read more
Paperback
180 pp.14.2X21.6cm
14.95
Consuming Desires
Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East
Frances S. HassoOver the course of the twentieth century, most Middle East states adopted a shari’a-based system for recognizing marriages. Partly in reaction to these dynamics, new types of marriage that evade the control of the state and religious authorities have emerged. These marriages allow for men and women to engage in sexual relationships, but do not require that they register the marriage with the state, that they live together, or that the man be financially responsible for the wife or household. In this new study, Frances Hasso explores the extent to which these new relationship forms are used and to what ends, as well as the legal and cultural responses to such innovations. She outlines what is at stake for the various groups—the state, religious leaders, opposition groups, young people, men and women of different classes and locations, and feminist organizations—in arguments for and against these relationship forms.
...read more
Paperback
272 pp.15X23cm
16.95